Hands-on: Catalyst 8.7 for AMD graphics cards with Vista x64

AMD kindly gave us the four versions of the driver (XP x86, XP x64, Vista x64 and Vista x64), but unfortunately not the Release Notes. Therefore we chose to put the Catalyst 8.7 to the same tests we used for the HD 4800 review.

Bioshock and Oblivion were left out, just like Need for Speed Carbon. The latter one only allowed resolutions up to 1,280x1,024 - but we benched at 1,680x1,050 with 4x FSSA and 16:1 AF.



Test system and configuration
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.600 MHz (400x9)
Board: Asus P5N-D (Nforce-750i-SLI-Chipsatz)
RAM: 4x 1.024 MiByte DDR2-800 (5-5-5-15)
OS: Windows Vista 64 Bit with SP1
GPU: Radeon HD 4870, 512 MiB GDDR5, 750/1.800 MHz

The Catalyst A.I. is set to default, since otherwise Bugfixes and optimizations for specific applications would have no effect.